16 GAMING
Pieter Van den Heede
Historical settings have played a prominent role in digital games for several decades (Mol et al., 2017; Schwarz, 2010a). In first- and third-person shooter games (FPS/TPS) such as Call of Duty (2003—), Battlefield (2002—), and Sniper Elite (2006—), players are seemingly able to step into the role of a soldier on the frontlines of historical conflicts, particularly World War II.
In strategy games such as Civilization (1991—), Total War (2000—), Crusader Kings (2004—), Anno (1998—), and Making History (2007—), in contrast, players are asked to take control of and successfully lead a political entity such as a nation-state or city by using various economic, diplomatic, and military means. And in action-adventure games such as Assassin’s Creed (2007—), players can explore historical virtual worlds which are rendered with a high degree of historical fidelity—at least according to the marketing (Shaw, 2015)—ranging from the Greek city-states during the Peloponnesian War and the “Holy Land” during the 12th-century Crusades to the cities of Boston and New York during the American Revolution.In order to understand the playing of these historical games as a form of reenactment, it is important to recognize reenactments as acts of self-referential Performativity. Reenactment as a concept refers to a variety of practices in which participants act out behaviors and attitudes that are believed to have existed in the past, in order to personally and affectively experience this past and seemingly access it in a direct manner (Agnew, 2004; 2007; Cook, 2004). Following this definition, historical digital games, too, can function as sites of reenactment, as they aim to let players virtually act out past behaviors and attitudes as part of a mediated experience (Rejack, 2007). However, as the activity of playing digital games also differs from other forms of reenactment, questions arise about the possibilities and limitations of the medium in comparison with other reenactment formats.
Digital games can best be understood as algorithmic artifacts that dialectically provide a mediated representation, requiring active input from the player in order to move that representation forward. As Chapman argues, playing digital games involves two broader sets of actions. First, it involves reading, i.e., the reflexive process of meaning-making that arises when players interpret a text, as with books, documentaries, and films (mediality; documentary). Second, it involves doing, i.e., the active engagement of the player with various rule-based phenomena. Essential for this dichotomy is that the doing-activities of the player should be seen as con- figurative, in that players actively co-determine aspects of the representation that are produced and appropriated through play. As a result, historical digital games, as a format for historical meaning-making, are characterized by a sense of shared authorship not seen in other formats: the performances and narratives that are produced through play are always the outcome of decisions made by both the creators of a game and the actions undertaken by the player (for the entire paragraph, see Chapman, 2016, pp. 30—37).
Following this characterization, it is important to investigate how game creators structure the authorial and performative agency of the player while playing a historical digital game, and how players can confirm or subvert these constraints. Here, it is useful to look at the contexts in which digital games have been produced, and how the conventions that have been adopted in these contexts have shaped the referential performances that players can enact.
From the onset of gaming as a cultural phenomenon in the 1950s and 1960s, the creation of digital games has been firmly embedded in a male-dominated and commercial, entertainment-oriented production network that is militaristic in origin and reproduces Western-centric conceptions of history. Digital games have traditionally been created by and for adolescent and middle-aged males, and they often revolve around heterosexual male fantasies (Kerr, 2006; Kocurek, 2015) (gender).
At the same time, creators of historical digital games have adopted a design approach that is goal-oriented and centered on quantifiable winning conditions and meritocratic achievement. This has a significant impact on the ability of digital games to function as sites of reenactment, as many of the actions that players perform are integrated into a ludic structure that narrows the possibility of virtually enacting other past behaviors and attitudes. When playing the game Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate (2015), for example, by exploring the historical virtual game world as imagined by the creators of the game, players can seemingly observe life in 19th-century London in the throes of the Industrial Revolution. At the same time, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate as a ludic experience is centered on exploration and fighting activities, which players must pursue to obtain game points, access virtual equipment, and progress through the narrative. In the game, for example, players are asked to fight child labor by virtually killing factory owners. However, this provides no explanation as to why children were required to work in factories in 19th-century London. Furthermore, in order to let players easily navigate the virtual environment, the factories in the game are constructed as well-lit spaces with multiple entry points, in contradistinction to the architectural layout of factories at the time (Gilbert, 2017). These examples show how the ludic design of Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate not only prioritizes goal-oriented behavior, but also impacts the virtual world itself, as it is adapted from the historical record to accommodate ludic activities.Furthermore, digital games are a product of military, techno-scientific innovations that came about during the total wars of the 20th century and the nuclear age initiated by the Cold War (Crogan, 2011). Partly as a result of this, militaristic scenarios in which players take on the roles of soldiers or military commanders and virtually engage in historical battles have dominated the content of historical digital games.
War scenarios in digital games can be divided into three types: reenactment scenarios, revisionist scenarios, and proleptic scenarios. In reenactment scenarios, as depicted in the FPS-game series Call of Duty and Battlefield, players try to accurately recreate and reproduce specific wars, battles, armies, and equipment (Figure 16.1). In revisionist scenarios, as included in the game Kuma/War (2004), players are given the chance to reconfigure past events; in Kuma/War, for example, players can capture Osama Bin Laden in 1998 and forestall 9/11. Proleptic scenarios, as depicted in the strategy game Conflict of Nations: World War III (2018), are set in a fictional present or near future, with the aim of intervening in current “hot spots” (Smicker, 2010). What most of these ludic renditions of war have in common is that they do not represent the realities of wartime violence, but instead depict a sense of realism which focuses on technical and organizational details, like the rendition of weaponry and military strategies, rather than the troubling lived experiences of battle (Agnew, 2010; Galloway, 2006;Pieter Van den Heede
Figure 16.1 Screenshot from the World War II-themed first-person shooter (FPS) game Call of Duty WWII (2017). Source: www.mobygames.com/images/shots/1/927111-call-of-duty-wwii- playstation-4-screenshot—sneaking-up-on.jpg.
Payne, 2016). By adopting this focus on select elements of realism, these war-themed games aim to bring about a “reality effect,” as described by Barthes (2006). As a result, these virtual reenactments of war closely mirror the practices of real-life battle reenactments, albeit with significant differences. Players of reenactment war-games do not physically interact with historical materials, although historical games do allow for the rendition of expansive and detailed interactive environments and the virtual performance of transgressive actions such as killing.
Finally, ludic battle reenactment also enables other forms of community, in that players can virtually enact battles individually or in group settings, according to preference. In terms of social organization, digital wargame groups are often similar to traditional reenactment groups (Crabtree, 2013) (practices of reenactment).Finally, one might also highlight the Western-centered dimension of many historical digital games on the market. A notable example hereof are the games from the Civilization series, which, according to the promotional materials for the game, allow players to lead a “civilization” over a period of thousands of years (Firaxis Games, 2016). However, as players are asked to research a fixed sequence of technologies in the game and progress from an “Ancient Era” through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, up to the “Information Age,” the actions of the player are embedded in a historical grand narrative ofWestern progress, which offers little room for alternative conceptions of history (Ghys, 2012).
Partly due to a democratization of game creation in recent years, several independent creators have tried to provide alternative ludic scenarios as sites for virtual reenactment. In the game This War of Mine (2014), players inhabit the position of civilians trying to survive a fictionalized rendition of the Siege of Sarajevo during the 1990s (trauma). In 2016, Kors et al. (2016) designed the multisensory mixed-reality game, A Breathtaking Journey, which allows players to assume the embodied first-person perspective of a refugee through a virtual reality (VR) installation and simulates the feeling of fleeing from war violence (dark tourism) (Figure 16.2). The design
Figure 16.2 The mixed-reality game A Breathtaking Journey, as showcased during the DutchVR Days (Amsterdam, 2015). In A Breathtaking Journey, players are placed in the position of a refugee who is fleeing from a war-torn country by hiding in the back of a truck.
To achieve this, the virtual reality experience of the game is augmented with a number of physical elements, such as a tangible contraption that mimics the inside of a truck. The game was created by researchers of the Delft University of Technology, The Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, and the Eindhoven University of Technology. Source: Kors, MJL, Ferri, G., van der Spek, ED, et al. (2016). “A Breathtaking Journey: On the Design of an Empathy-Arousing Mixed-Reality Game,” in Proceedings of the 2016 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play - CHI PLAY '16, New York, 2016, pp. 91-104. ACM Press.of the game follows the premises of serious gaming, which is centered on ludic engagement for purposes other than entertainment, namely education and training (Ritterfeld et al., 2009). More broadly, scholars such as Flanagan (2009) have argued for the creation of games that aim for artistic expression, critical reflection, and social change. This effort has been supported by, for example, the New York-based organization Games for Change, which has stimulated the creation of social impact games since 2004 (Games for Change, 2018). It has resulted in digital games that may have limited outreach, but which nevertheless provide a significant counter-message to the masculine, militarized, and entertainment-oriented digital games discussed previously.
In light of these developments, one can reflect on the possibilities of digital games as sites for players to reenact the past more generally. Here, it is useful to adopt the framework of ecological psychology and analyze the affordances of digital games—in other words, how digital games as virtual environments allow players to act in specific ways (Linderoth and Bennerstedt, 2007). Based on this approach, Chapman argues that historical digital games, and especially ones that offer players a first-person perspective, allow for engagements with heritage that are similar to visiting museum and living history exhibitions. Specifically, players of these games are able to observe and manipulate, albeit virtually rather than haptically, objects in a pre-structured environment, as is the case in many heritage museum exhibitions. In addition, Chapman argues that
Pieter Van den Heede
the same first-person perspective games can allow for a form of actualized reenactment, in that, due to a certain overlap in sensory perceptions between represented historical agents and players, the latter can gain insights into the perceptual and physical challenges that historical agents faced. Here, however, it is important to emphasize that these ludic experiences mostly fail to provide insights into the socio-cultural and economic contexts of a given historical scenario. Neither creators nor players of historical digital games can overcome their presentist epistemologies, as is also the case for most other forms of reenactment (Agnew, 2004). In relation to other types of games, such as strategy games, Chapman argues that these can allow for exploratory reflection (albeit strongly abstracted) in which, for example, counterfactual scenarios can generate insights into processes of historical causality and contingency. At the same time, however, these exploratory insights are mostly predesigned by the creators of the game and rely on an exaggerated sense of player agency and access to information not available to historical actors (for the entire paragraph, see Chapman, 2016, pp. 173—230). Finally, the extent to which historical digital games can foster unforeseen insights through virtual Performativity has mostly remained underexplored until now. Here, for example, the occurrence of a virtual epidemic that led to massive virtual death in the online game World of Warcraft (2004)—initiated by a software bug implemented by the developers and purposefully aggravated by players—suggests that emergent historical insights could perhaps be gained through digital ludic engagement in an abstracted form (for a discussion of the epidemic, see Lofgren and Fefferman, 2007).
Further reading
Apperley, T., 2010; Chapman, A., 2016; Keogh, B., 2018; Kerr, A.; 2017; Stahl, R., 2010.